


anthem of a bird (with a broken wing)

by digits_of_phi



Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game), Original Work
Genre: Angst, Anxiety, Backstory, Curse of Strahd, Existential Angst, Non-Graphic Violence, Past Violence, Supernatural Elements, because i'm in love with her, mentions of child death, why would i make a visibly non-human character for a curse of strahd campaign?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-13
Updated: 2019-10-13
Packaged: 2020-12-14 07:03:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21011702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/digits_of_phi/pseuds/digits_of_phi
Summary: Every child in my tribe has lost a parent. Every parent in my tribe has lost a child. Though we mark our peregrinations over the backs of our gods, our fate is an unkind one.





	anthem of a bird (with a broken wing)

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Bird With A Broken Wing" by Owl City
> 
> This is the backstory of Feather Stillbranch, my earth genasi Giant Soul sorcerer from my Curse of Strahd game. She's wonderful and perfect and I'm definitely not at all projecting on her.  


The people of my tribe are good people. They wear their personhood like a still lake wears sunlight: warm and glittering on the surface, cold and unfamiliar in its depths. I have no right to condemn them, though: I am nothing at all like a person.

My parents are human, bound in flesh, like all the most interesting books. Their knees and foreheads are stained with dirt, their prayers soaking into the earth of the hills like rain, like tears. My people are pious and humble, made meek by years of persecution, made faithful by years of toil.

Our forefathers were driven from homes and cities and businesses and temples by their ravings of titanic gods formed from the earth, standing in judgement over the fleshy ants wriggling at their feet. My people, hounded by mockery and the gospels of less terrestrial gods, were driven to the dark and wind-swept hills. We found our gods there, found them in the looming shadows at our shoulders, found them in the hulking darknesses in our dreams. The hills carried our footprints like tokens of love, so we kept walking. We are cyclical wanderers, each year marking a passage over our hills, ever rambling, ever pilgrims.

Every child in my tribe has lost a parent. Every parent in my tribe has lost a child. Though we mark our peregrinations over the backs of our gods, our fate is an unkind one. We are a vulnerable people, without fighters, cradling our meager scraps of magic to our hearts. We have been robbed and raided as we trudge eastward through the hills, pillaged and plundered as we return westward. We teach our children to shy away from outsiders, to cower and cringe at the glint of a naked blade, to approach strangers with a downcast gaze, but to never, even upon pain of death, deny the truth of our faith.

My people are not fighters. We have no swords. The few magics bestowed by our faith are bent to healing. We are wanderers: pain and violence are rooted so deeply in our history that even in times of peace, we fear their shapes in our nightmares. But our few surviving children were starving, and our few surviving elders were frail, and our few surviving mothers were barren, and the dirt was thinning below our feet and the great shadows in our dreams were silent.

My people are not fighters, so they dreamt the shape of a champion and wept to the wordless hills for salvation.

On the dawn of a spring equinox, thawing and blooming with the promise of rebirth, my mothers pressed their hands to the cold ground and whispered the prayer of me into the earth. Three nights later, as the full moon swam to the height of the night sky, I was planted like a seed in my mother's womb and the hills rumbled as if with laughter. And later still, as the last sun of summer hid its blushing face behind the hills, I was brought, silent and staring, into the world.

My mothers are human, bound with flesh, hair tied back, buoyed by breath, eyes warm behind soft eyelids. 

I am not human. My body is of the earth upon which my people wander, brown and rich like the good soil it is. I have often been told that I am fertile ground. Flowering vines bloom from my head, thick and verdant. My eyes are like chips of mica, and I blink only out of habit.

On the day I was born, a copse of trees long thought barren bore fruit once more. That night, as I, newly sprouted, slept at my mother's breast, I dreamt that one of our hills stirred and straightened her curved spine, reached out an enormous hand and cradled me in her lined, meadow-sized palm, brought me to her smiling face, and called me _daughter_.

They are not gods. My people revere them as such, but the hills have shown me their faces. They are giants, forces of nature granted life. They are the earth itself, so ageless that their minds move in seasons rather than in thoughts. They are older than flesh and larger than legends and quieter than stars, but our hills are not gods. They are giants.

I am the last of their line.

I stumbled often as a child, that familiar human clumsiness present even in me, and the earth always caught me gently. It grew me a walking stick of gnarled wood, sturdy and steadfast, that grew as I did. My people took it as a talisman, a symbol of divine favor. They took care not to bow before me, but even as a child, I saw the mingling of wariness and awe in their eyes as I gave them flowers from my hair, as dirt came away on their palms after they touched me. Even as a child, I thought, _If I loved a monster, that is how I would look at her_.

My mothers taught me their own strangeness and bore mine with the ease of love. Mama, the best healer in the tribe, taught me the uses of plants and pressed books into my open hands and taught me the virtues of strength. Mother, who felt me grow like a flower in her womb, calmed my terror when the sapling of my magic first took root in my chest and helped me shape it into my first spell. Globes of light danced above our heads that night. My mothers glowed with pride, and the flowers in my hair bloomed.

My people believed in me, the same way a drooping flower believes in rain. The first time I drove away a troupe of raiders, the elders fell to their knees and pressed my hands to their foreheads, called me champion and salvation and god-sent, called me the ground in which their truth would be planted. I smiled and pulled away, hoping that they didn't notice my shaking hands, that they would mistake the tears of panic irrigating my cheeks for dew.

For years, they prepared me for this destiny. Not even my mothers could defend me from this new terror, for this was the answer to the prayers that birthed me. My ancestors were pleased as I learned to weave magic from the heart of the earth, as I fought back those who would harm my people, as crops took root and grew and flowered, as my people came, for the first time in untold years, to a sort of peace. I could feel the hills rumbling in my dreams.

My people told me that I had driven evil from our holy ground, that I was the favorite of the favored, that my destiny lay before me like a sunlit path. But doubt was my constant companion, lodged between my heart and my ribs like a chisel in stone. I was the daughter of two worlds-- one foot buried in the unchanging earth and the other planted on the road of my destiny-- and neither would have me as I was, no matter how fiercely I loved them both, no matter how purely they both frightened me. I was frightened, into silence, into indecision, into panic. Every time my people looked to me for salvation, my heart beat fast in my ears, like a bird, like a rabbit, like a human.

In the end, they sent me away. _To grow in power_, one elder told me gravely, straightening my clothes. _To spread our faith_, the other elder added, correcting my posture. _To find yourself_, my mothers finished, tears in their eyes, Mama touching my right cheek, Mother touching my left. The ground warmed and flowered beneath my feet. A pit in my stomach trembled with fear and stank with failure.

When I walked away, it was to the north. For the first time in my life, the hills were behind me. The ground was soft below my feet and for the first time in my life, I was not walking in a circle.

My staff, worn smooth from years of familiarity with my palms, trembled in my grasp. My head swam, dizzy with fear and exultation and grief. In a fit of strange madness, I lifted my face to the sun and screamed a lone, high note like a bird trapped in the sky. No voice answered me. The ground was still below my feet.

I was alone.


End file.
